My New Town Has a Weird History

(The following is a work a fiction, part of an on-going series of vignettes about the made-up town of Abdera, Florida.) 001/???

I arrived in Abdera, Florida on January 3, 2019. I guess you could say I moved here and live here now. I needed a change of life and picked a town at random. The following story is printed on the back of the menu at the diner I’ve been frequenting. I’m copying it here so you can see some of the cool things about my city. I’ve decided that in addition to driving for Uber I’ll also set up a blog to make money that way.

Here it is:

Fun Facts About Abdera!

One of North America’s earliest robot-builders once lived off the coast of Abdera, Florida. Professor Stella Surly lived on a tiny barrier island, which she named Surly Island, between 1888 and 1921. Initially serving as her vacation home she moved there permanently after the Spanish-American War in 1898.

Surly exhibited a gift for technical design since childhood. She attended Vassar College after the Civil War and pursued a successful career in commercial art. She made a fortune, however, with various martial inventions. Surly remained ambivalent about her contributions to improving the tools of war, but made herself a millionaire several times.

While living at Surly Island Stella spent her time developing animal automatons. Her dream was to create a robot army that could take the place of human soldiers. Local citizens remember seeing her in town showing off her latest ‘bots (or auto-animals as she called them), a variety of automaton cats and dogs. Some even remember her guiding through the streets an automated alligator she controlled with a radio-control device!

Unfortunately, the 1921 hurricane not only destroyed Surly’s house, but the tremendous waves demolished the small barrier island on which she built her home and laboratories. None of Surly’s work remains today, but a few Abderites still remember watching the lady artist/scientist walking the streets of Abdera with her pet robot dog.

Wipe: A Brief History of Toilet Hygiene

INTRO

“What am I looking for in this passionate searching through articles? I am looking for a viewpoint that will make a different world around me when I look up and out the window, a different universe, the same great change I saw when I first started reading science fiction.” – Katherine MacLean

Kant likened the worst of humanity to the Abderites, hence Abderitic –

“Bustling folly is the character of our species: people hastily set off on the path of the good, but do not persevere steadfastly upon it; indeed, in order to avoid being bound to a single goal, even if only for the sake of variety they reverse the plan of progress, build in order to demolish, and impose upon themselves the hopeless effort of rolling the stone of Sisyphus uphill in order to let it roll back down again.” — Immanuel Kant

*abderitic – believing the world is getting neither worse nor better, while simultaneously believing the world is getting both better and worse.